Re: Laptops which run Arch

I've posted in this thread somewhere before I'm sure, but I've finally got everything on my laptop (Asus U52F) working pretty much 100%.

Power management (using just pm-utils) is working perfectly, all good in powertop, I get around 5 hrs of battery life.Suspend/Resume/Hibernate are all working perfectly ( did need to use a script to get resume from suspend working though)Wireless/Audio(including HDMI output)/Touchpad/Keyboard (Including multimedia and volume hotkeys) are all working great.Intel graphics have always worked great for me, but I did have a problem with compiz + most of the dock programs I tried (awn, docky, plank, and dockbarx are all giving me graphical glitchiness for some reason, other apps are fine..)Fast boot time (12-14 seconds to LXDM). Super responsive and stable XFCE desktop, no crashing or instability.

On 66% brightness, it seems like about 8 hours seems to be the sweet spot for typical usage (web browsing and vim). 100% brightness seems to knock this down to the 5-6 hour range. I've only had the laptop for a couple of days, so these numbers are pretty rough and based somewhat on extrapolation.

I have all of the tweaks suggested by `powertop` enabled for the exception of SATA link power management (because I am using an SSD). This includes wifi, audio and usb power management.

I also have the 'ondemand' CPU frequency governor enable, which is the default nowadays anyway. Changing governors (tested powersave, performance and conservative) works perfectly.

Disable KMS when using the current Archlinux installer

The current default Archlinux installer uses an older kernel that doesn't included the updated drivers for Intel's HD 4000 graphics (and possibly wifi?), so KMS fails once it tries to load---which ends up borking the display. To get around this, add 'nomodeset' to the kernel boot parameters to disable KMS. You'll have to do this again on initial boot if you install the kernel that comes with the installer. Once an updated kernel is installed, this boot parameter is no longer needed. (I also tried one of the snapshot installers, but it was having trouble setting up the mount points.)

Most of the current T420 wiki page is relevant

And by that I mean, most things just work. Wifi, graphics (with xf86-video-intel), CPU frequency scaling, screen brightness, keyboard backlight, and excellent two finger scrolling (out-of-the-box with xf86-input-synaptics, no configuration necessary despite what the T420 wiki article says).

Thinkfan

I installed thinkfan and added the thinkpad_acpi kernel module to MODULES in rc.conf. This is my thinkfan /etc/thinkfan.conf:

The settings are tweaked (a little less aggressive) from http://www.jakubkotowski.com/2011/06/th … tings.html. I've tested it with the utilities in the cpuburn package and it seems to work well. For me, the fan stays off when idle and kicks into its lowest settings on typical usage (web browsing and vim, for me).

acpid

This also worked out of the box with one small tweak. In /etc/acpi/handler.sh, I replaced

ac_adapter)
case "$2" in
AC|ACAD|ADP0)

with

ac_adapter)
case "$2" in
ACPI*|AC|ACAD|ADP0)

Basically, the 'ac_adapter' event is called with the first two arguments as 'ac_adapter ACPI0003:00', and 'AC|ACAD|ADP0' doesn't match that.

pm-utils

Works beautifully. Literally no problems.

laptop-mode-utils

I don't use it. acpid + pm-utils + powertop's recommended tweaks are enough for me. (I use acpid to raise and lower the brightness when the AC adapter is [un]plugged, and make sure that on wakeup/boot, the brightness is set appropriately.)

Sleep button

For whatever reason I haven't been able to discover, I cannot detect any power button presses (neither through `acpi_listen` or `xev`). However, the T430 has an extra unlabeled button to the right of 'turn microphone on/off' button that shows up in xev as 'XF86Launch1'. I put this in my ~/.xbindkeys:

"sudo pm-suspend"
XF86Launch1

And it's now a sleep button. (As long as you set 'pm-suspend' to require no password using `visudo`.)

Web cam

Just works. I installed 'guvcview' and then ran it. It worked.

Audio/speakers

Alsa just works. Speakers sound good enough to me. (I'm no audiophile though, and have never been too picky over audio quality. My ears aren't very discerning.)

Haven't tested

VGA. Mini display port. Mic. USB 3.0. mSATA. Memory card slot.

I don't anticipate any problems with these things, though.

Conclusion

Archlinux works beautifully on this machine. I literally could not have imagined a smoother experience. I've installed Arch on several laptops, and this was by far the easiest. Having the wifi driver included in the kernel is an especially nice thing that I'm not used to. (Been a victim of broadcom for many years.) Also, the integrated graphics works beautifully, although I am not doing any compositing beyond xcompmgr transparency.

The laptop also has excellent ventilation and actually stays cool enough for it to be bearable to sit directly on my lap for extended periods of time.

This laptop also comes with the option of adding nvidia via Optimus. I recommend staying away from this unless you're willing to deal with Bumblebee. There is also a 1366x768 screen option, and based on preliminary reviews, it isn't that great. Go with the 1600x900 screen---it's quite good.

Education is favorable to liberty. Freedom can exist only in a society of knowledge. Without learning, men are incapable of knowing their rights, and where learning is confined to a few people, liberty can be neither equal nor universal.

Re: Laptops which run Arch

Dell Inspiron N5040 Works perfectly with Linux >= 3.0 (have not tested older kernels).Intel CPU graphics works well for 2D on Arch.However, I did not manage to have a decent resolution on FreeBSD.

Asus X52J Works perfectly except for the video card (a kind of underground AMD HD 3300 which is extremely badly supported by official drivers).Screen flickers for a few seconds after stand by.I experienced a regression with Wifi on a kernel update. That's when I learnt to always have a fallback kernel installed! (Either custom or LTS).Regression was fixed within a few days.

Compaq 615 (not sure of the name name)Took me a while to understand that its BIOS (which runs a graphical layer btw) could not boot any Arch, BSD or some other distro setups.It has a very poor support of bootloaders indeed: in that case Syslinux will not work (which is what Arch Iso uses).So I ended up installing another distro, and chrooting a Arch system from there, then removing the first distro.Otherwise everything worked properly.

Re: Laptops which run Arch

Everything works perfectly. Amazing boot time ~7 seconds with / on ssd.You need nomodeset for install because of kernel < 3.2 in install image.Touchpad is synaptics clickpad, so for right click you need:

Re: Laptops which run Arch

Everything works perfectly. Amazing boot time ~7 seconds with / on ssd.You need nomodeset for install because of kernel < 3.2 in install image.Touchpad is synaptics clickpad, so for right click you need:

This netbook unfortunately gives hard lockups at seemingly random invtervals, not distro specific. Seems like a bug in the chipset or broadom-wl driver. Both the wl driver and brcmsmac need to be blacklisted otherwise udev gives a kernel panic.

Re: Laptops which run Arch

Hi. I know this thread might not belong here, but I respect the opinions of arch community over most others.I'm looking to buy a new laptop, and will be putting arch on it. I was wondering if there are any manufacturers to stay away from, or that are recommended. I've had trouble with getting some hp laptops to take linux in the past, so I'll likely stay away from that one. The two I'm considering are ASUS and Toshiba.

Some opinions on which of these two laptops you'd go for would be great too.

Re: Laptops which run Arch

Running Arch on ASUS N53SN.

It took me a great deal of time configuring Arch in the way I wanted and now everything works flawlessly. The major problem was power consumption but now it's not a problem anymore, thanks to laptopmode-tools and bumblebee.

Re: Laptops which run Arch

Thinkpad L530 (N2S2TGE)

I'm an Arch Linux user for years, so that's what I chose to be my laptop operating system as well. At first I repartitioned the all-consuming Windows partition and cut the space by half to make some room. I had no problems installing the system from the 2001.08 core x64 image (just needed to boot with "nomodeset" until I updated the kernel). I'm not going into detail about the process itself, so let's jump straight to the hardware features..

Is works out-of-the-box with the rtl8192ce driver , which is kind of awesome. I did experience some connection problems after updating the installed kernel to 3.4, which magically disappeared as I started using NetworkManager. Well, all in all I really can't complain here.

Bluetooth

The built-in bluetooth adapter works fine without any special treatment, I installed bluez and blueman and it just worked. But I don't use it a lot, so no much details here. Just for the sake of testing I paired my laptop with my smartphone and successfully sent a file, so I suppose everything is fine.

Speakers and microphone

Both speakers and microphone are detected and work fine without any special configuration, just install alsa-utils and unmute in alsamixer, and there you go. The speaker sound quality is not really inspiring, but what to expect from a low-budget laptop?

Webcam

The webcam also works with default drivers out-of-the-box. The device is:

Bus 001 Device 005: ID 04f2:b2ea Chicony Electronics Co., Ltd

I tested both the microphone and webcam with Skype, it works as expected.

Graphics

This laptop features the Intel HD 4000 shared on-board graphics, which is for sure better than the NVidia GT 520 in my old computer. Not exactly a gaming card, but it does it's job well, even with my casual games. The drivers are xf86-video-intel-sna and libva-driver-intel. I could start X at the best resolution and with 3D accelleration without even creating a xorg.conf! That's really new to me and it feels really good.

Processor

The reason for purchasing the L530 with an i5 processor is of course the built-in Turboboost. The processor is i5-3210M with 2,5GHz (up to 3,1GHz Turboboost). With the normal tools like cpufreq-info you only see the max. speed as 2,5 GHz, but with i7z I actually have seen that the boost works, indeed.

VGA-Port

I can't imagine living without two monitors. Fortunately I don't have to. Plug in and go. The Intel drivers support dual monitor with 3D accelleration flawlessly, xrandr is your friend.

Special keys

All special keys except the microphone mute key work fine and either do their job, or are bindable to something. The misbehaving mic-mute key seems to be a discussed problem already concerning not only this laptop.

Power management

I use laptop-tools together with hdparm and acpid. It works fine, meaning that the hard drive spins down, the cpu speed is reduced to 1,2 GHz when idling and the brightness adjustment works as well. The power usage is about 9-14W in battery mode, about 30+W wired. Suspend-to-RAM works fine, but hibernation failed for some reason. It might be my fault, though. Update: It was my fault, indeed. Had to enable the resume hook for the kernel, after that hibernation works fine too!

The card reader was the only device that required some external drivers. I downloaded the driver from the Realtek homepage and also created an AUR package (rts5229) which makes the SD card reader work. No drama at all.

Fingerprint Reader

Although the ThinkWiki says that my device (Bus 001 Device 003: ID 147e:1002 Upek) is not supported under linux, that's not quite the truth. It works perfectly fine with fingerprint-gui, which is also located in the AUR. It does it's job very well after setting it up correctly (see ArchWiki for FPrint).

Touchpad and Trackpoint

The Touchpad works with default synaptics drivers. The Trackpoint does not work at all and that makes me a bit sad. It's not recognized as part of the Touchpad and also not recognized as any other input device. I found no way to make it work. At least I never had the time to get used to it, so I'm not missing it much.

Well, I hope I didn't forget some important hardware component. Anyhow, I can say that the whole setup was quite painless.

The little trickier pieces were the fingerprint reader and sd card reader, which do work fine after installing the right drivers, but it's annoying that the micmute key and the trackpoint do not work (at least for now).

Other than that, I am a happy new Lenovo-customer and Thinkpad-believer

This netbook unfortunately gives hard lockups at seemingly random invtervals, not distro specific. Seems like a bug in the chipset or broadom-wl driver. Both the wl driver and brcmsmac need to be blacklisted otherwise udev gives a kernel panic.

Re: Laptops which run Arch

HP G62 intel i3Very quiet and keeps cool.Everything seems to works fine.I run a very minimal system, Openbox, no panel, Xfe fm and Chromium.Fitted a Seagate hybrid 500GB HDD, it boots from power on to desktop in 13 seconds and I manually type in user/pass and startx.Apparently it has two graphics cards, an intel and an ati. I just use the intel one and the standard size glxgears gives me 1032fps.

I am well pleased with the laptop and recommend it although I have heard earlier models of this same laptop had over heating problems, they were probably windows users though.

This is my main PC nowadays, I do have an Advent 4211 as a backup but I use this HP for all my main computer needs.

have some problems with Touchpad, though.This notebook have a Elantech touchpad, which can be enabled with synaptics driver.two finger scrolling, multitouch works.but it randomly stutters and scrolls - dmesg reported "touchpad resynced" or something.still no luck on fixing that :s

Re: Laptops which run Arch

HP 630 B2X98PA

Didn't encounter any hardware related problems, although I haven't tried bluetooth or the microphone.

I had problems configuring the touchpad, mostly because synaptics was ignoring 10-synaptics.conf. I suspect this was caused by installing kdebase-konsole as my terminal window, in the Xfce environment. In any case, it was fixed by uninstalling then reinstalling all of X and Xfce, while leaving kdebase-konsole in place.